This free event brings you the best of Microsoft’s premier web & devices conference (MIX) at no cost to you. All you need to do is register and get yourself down to the RDS in Ballsbridge on June 9th!

Join the conversation at reMIX Dublin – see the latest tools and technologies and draw inspiration from a professional community of your peers and experts.

The morning session from 9am to 1pm focuses on tools and technologies for developers: developing for Windows 7, the Cloud, what’s coming up with Windows 7.5 and Kinect Hackables.

The afternoon will be focusing on UX (User eXperience) especially multitouch and Miscrosoft’s Surface device including a look at the future of user interaction and designing infographics for Web Applications with Des Traynor from Contrast.

The final session of the day is a set of lightning talks by some well known designers and developers from Microsoft and beyond covering topics such as storytelling for user experience and the lost art of simplicity.

On behalf of our members and all the right thinking people of the world if you are going to surf the web try to do it in the newest browser possible. This means, at time of writing, depending on your own tastes and the type of operating system (OS) you are running you should be using Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera 9.64, Safari 4 or Google Chrome. Clicking on any of those links will bring you to the latest version. There are also other browser types available but these are the most commonly used. Click here to find out more about Browser statistics.

Now, of course, I am aware that in some larger organisations the end user doesn’t control the software that is installed on their machine. However if your job involves you using a browser you should encourage the powers that be to let you do your job to the best of your ability by installing the latest technology.

Why do we give a hoot what browser version you are using? Here’s why:

Developers and designers have their hearts broken trying to create brilliant websites that cover multiple browser types. They will generally be realistic and develop/design for the latest version minus one so if you’re using IE6 you’re currently a heartbreaker.

IE6 in particular is considered a low point in browser history. Don’t just take my word for it. Read this, this, and this for starters.

This leads to item no 3. Money saving: The Bring down IE6 campaign suggests that the 20% of web users using IE6 are “business users” “who “pressure designers to ’force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money.” That time and money (your time and money!) could be spent more cost-effectively surely?

Security: the latest browser versions will generally protect you against the latest web-borne security threats. Generally. I’m not getting into a discussion about bugs in browsers and hacks but I’ll moderate one if you wish to leave a comment on this issue. I’m not a security expert but I’m hoping some of our readers might be able to expand on this in the comments below.

In business there are many confounding variables that face you. Internal and external pressures at every corner. If you sell products then you must have people who must decide to buy and use your products, the same for any services that you provide. The web has opened up new horizons of possibility but how do you really get it right? Trying to understand what makes your users tick is a full time job in itself and not exactly an exact science.

Therefore coming to the IIA User Experience Working Group’s annual conference on the theme of “Brand building, profitability and customer loyalty through better User Experience” will really help you. Meet with some practitioners who spend their time trying to understand the user experience. There are many diverse and experienced speakers at this event who will endeavour to share what they have learned as practitioners. You will come away from this event with, at the very least, the realisation that there is a lot to be learned when you consider the complexity of the very people you are trying to reach, and hopefully a trick or two that may help you to improve the quality of the services that you offer.

I have my bed bagsed in my brother’s place in Kilkenny. I look forward to seeing you at PodCamp Ireland if you are going. The excitement is mounting, not least because of the organisers’ use of social media to attract attention. I’ve been listening to their podcasts, for example, and I think that Krishna De’s interview from last week’s podcast with Michele Neylon of Blacknight Solutions has some great pointers for those planning their domain name purchases, especially if you are considering buying a second-hand domain. Also on the show, winner of Best Personal Blogger in last year’s Irish Blog Awards, Grannymar, talks about her experience of starting a blog, giving some very good pointers on the essence of blogs, saying that some days she might only write two lines or post a photo and other days she might do more. As Krishna herself says Grannymar is an inspiration not least because she tells listeners to just go for it and commenters to get involved, “they are the lifeblood of any blog”. Even though hers is a personl blog, much that she has to say holds true for anyone considering starting a business blog. You can listen here at BlogTalkRadio (no fancy players required!). PodCampIreland are making use of all types of new and social media like RSS and blogs and microblogs and of course podcasts to facilitate the varied audience they have. Most of their content is published once but received by many in “the flavour” they like and much of it is done using free or cost-effective online applications.

Speaking of considering starting a business blog, one of our members has recently taken the plunge and considering the summer we have had here in Ireland I am amazed they had the time. Aedan and Suzanne Ryan are the people behind PuddleDucks, a company who sell waterproof clothing for adults and children. Aedan commented that he was much inspired by what he heard at the IIA Congress back in May about how organisations big and small were using Social Media to engage with their customers. I particularly liked their timely post a couple of weeks ago about getting kitted out for Electric Picnic.

Another company who are getting really into social media recently are IIA members, FBD.ie. You may have read on the IIA.ie website that they have just launched their new site. Part of their marketing campaign involved Twitter, including an advance launch of their site to Twitterers. They are also actively seeking comments from bloggers and twitterers and are engaging with them. Other IIA members using Twitter are the aforemnetioned Blacknight Solutions for whom it is, as they, a no-brainer with the profile of their clients. Two other IIA members, The Irish Times and RTÉ are also on Twitter but rather than using Twitter to start a conversation, they are using it to facilitate Twitterers who want regular news updates. RTÉ are feeding each of their news types through different twitter channels using the RSS feeds from their site.

The great thing about Twitter for a company like FBD, for example, is that they can approach those who twitter and if the Twitterer wants to, they can choose to allow FBD to follow them or not and conversely they can choose to follow FBD or not. It’s all about permission so it suits both parties very well. I have to admit that when setting my own ground rules for the IIA Twitter I decided that I would not follow anyone unless they followed IIA becuase I did not wish to be intrusive. I had, as I have mentioned before, been twittering in a personal capacity for some time and many of those following me were happy to follow the IIA tweets as well. I suppose the single greatest thing about Twitter and other microblogging platforms is that they allow users who aren’t constantly in front of a computer remain connected through their mobile phone by either updating via text, receiving updates by text or if the user has mobile internet capability on their phone a third party application can often be installed to microblog from your phone. I use Twibble on my Nokia E51 and I also have a Twitterfone account (Twitterfone was developed by Irish company Maxroam) which allows me to leave voice messages that are converted into text, ready for Twitter. I also use TwitPic which allows me to send photos from my phone by SMS. So for example I was able to twitter the Liffey Swim last Saturday. Great fun no doubt but imagine you were able to show the world your latest product the minute it arrived? Or twitter pictures of new staff so people would know them? Or a picture of your exhibition stand at a conference so people would know exactly what to look for? (Let’s hear how you are using these applications in your business: leave a comment below.) The name of the game is facilitation and developers are creating all sorts of web and mobile applications for all sorts of platforms to facilitate users and business users can mix and match their social media to create a mix to suit their customer base. While I wonder about the longevity of Twitter’s tenure as a killer app, I find Twitter can be a good source of information, feedback and every now and then, great entertainment and I just hope others feel the same way about our Tweets!

The IIA welcome Pixel Design to its membership. Pixel Design is a graphic design and web design service, based in Dublin Ireland offering a complete range of design services to business start-ups and SMEs. A nice fit for the current IIA membership then!

Based on their online portfolio Pixel Design seem to have a varied client base including many well known arts organisations. I wonder do they get tickets to all those fancy openings and launches?

I’ve just read a great new book by Shawn Henry of W3C WAI – “Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design”. It tells you all you need to know about how to develop effective accessibility solutions efficiently within the user centred design process. It presents lots of different ways of including people with disabilities in user profiles, personas, user testing, etc. All very practical and well explained.

I see a lot of PowerPoint presentations and give a few myself. I’m always trying to do it better. Sometimes I fail, like when I tried to emulate Dick Hardt’s incredible presentation style which proved to be quite difficult and not really ‘me’. But at least I think I avoid some of the worst PowerPoint nightmares that you often see. In terms of usability and accessibility a lot of presentations are just plain rubbish! You see the same problems repeated over and over and you wonder how on earth presenters don’t cop on. But they don’t. So here are a few simple pointers to designing slides that won’t destroy the user experience for your audience.

Use large text

Then make it twice as large again. Seriously! You’re sitting a foot away from a good quality monitor when you write your slides. Your audience may be viewing a poorly projected image from 20 feet or more away. And not everyone has great eyesight. So fill the screen with big letters.

Use fewer words

You’ll have to in order to have a big enough text size, but it will make your presentation better anyway. Here’s an example of one of my slides from a recent presentation:

I could have done this instead:

But why put all that on the slide when I’m gong to say it anyway, and say it with feeling? The people at the back will strain to read it and everyone’s attention will be split between listening to me and reading the slide. If you need something to read yourself while you present, it’s better to use cue cards. Even worse is when a presenter writes what looks like a whole bible chapter on the slide then says only a few words about it. You’re left thinking “Hey wait a minute, what did I miss there?”. Pointless and damaging.

Be careful with colours and contrast

Venues, projectors and even projection screens vary a lot – a LOT! Poor setup and bad lighting can make the image on the screen very dim and washed out. How many times have you looked at what’s on your laptop, looked at what’s on the projector screen and thought “where did all my colours go?”. Your beautiful pink has turned into muddy brown and the blue is dishwater grey. It happens all too often. Be prepared, it can end up looking like this or worse:

Probably okay at the top, but with the graded background it becomes more and more difficult to read as you go down. Notice how even the contrasting colours at the top are rendered useless by having too much text which is too small. And what’s he doing with his back to the audience reading it? Come on! That’s not very engaging is it!

No complicated graphs or diagrams

What is the point of this?:

From “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” by Thomas E. Ricks.

This is an actual slide used in a US Military briefing on Iraq. Although when you think about it, it’s actually quite an accurate picture of the chaotic situation it depicts.

That’s not all

Okay, following these 4 pointers won’t make you a super presenter like Dick Hardt or some of the guys featured on Presentation Zen. But it will ensure that people can actually read the content of your slides and they don’t get in the way of your words.

If in doubt, DO NOT ask advice from the people who created PowerPoint. You might end up with something like this:

NCBI recently got some funding from the Department of the Taoiseach under the Access, Skills and Content initiative to create a wiki. The result is vipipedia. The “vip” prefix stands for “vision impaired person” and the wiki contains mostly “how-to” articles written by and for people with vision impairments. Topics like “detecting colours of clothing” – a very important ability for the sartorially elegant blind man or woman about town!

User centred design

The experience of creating it was a typical example of inclusive, user centred design. First we gathered information about users and their requirements using focus groups – who might use this wiki and what level of experience would they have? At the same time we carried out an analysis of existing wikis and wiki creation tools. To what extent did they support the functionality, accessibility and usability we required? Based on these findings, we chose our tool, built the wiki, user tested it, rebuilt it and are now ready to let it out into the world.

Wiki building tools

It’s pretty easy to build a wiki using tools like Wikispaces or PBwiki. Not only that, but the usability and accessibility of the wikis they produce is pretty good, with some minor niggles. However, we opted to use the MediaWiki software, as used by Wikipedia among others, and host it ourselves. This has the benefit that it is more configurable, so the resulting wiki can be as good or better in terms of functionality, accessibility and ease of use.

First impressions

So we built our wiki and we made sure it was accessible, then we asked a few people to try it out – Oh dear!

Now I should say at this point that we are accessibility and usability experts and a wiki doesn’t seem that complicated, but listen to some of the comments we got:

Frankly, I was baffled by its complexity.

I couldn’t work out which part would be open to visitors, which to contributors and which to moderators.

The content seems to be just placed at random below the bottom of the first list.

This is important information to know about, but comments are just comments. Why did they find it so complicated? Is it in the nature of a wiki? Or was it to do with our user interface design? The only way to find out was to run user tests. We recruited typical wiki users, invited them into the CFIT user test facility and asked them to read, write and edit a number of articles. And we discovered what was wrong.

What went wrong

Firstly, wikis are different from your average website. Wiki concepts like editing and history and the lack of a site-wide ‘navigation’ structure were rather alien to our users. The tabbed interface, where each tab gives a different ‘view’ of the current article (text, discussion, editing or, history), was not so obvious without the visual cues. Creating or editing articles required users to use a complex markup language or a somewhat quirky editor.

Second, we had adopted a ‘clever’ design where the content came first, followed by the ‘navigation’ and ‘tools’. This was because we knew that the vast majority of users wanted to do only two things – search for articles and read articles. But the ‘upside down’ interface was so different from people’s usual experiences that they simply didn’t get it. It reminded me of when I was at Frontend and we created the original NDA IT Accessibility Guidelines. We built a ‘revolutionary’ user interface which filtered and repackaged the information according to your role and areas of interest. In user tests, nobody could find anything!

There were also problems with the default MediaWiki outputs – search results and history pages have confusing layouts and contain way more information than is necessary. To see what I mean, go to Wikipedia and click on the History tab of any article. Whew!

But thanks to the user testing, we were able to see exactly why all the users’ problems arose, then go away and fix them. The revised wiki is now very usable and accessible.

Next steps

We’re under no illusion though. Now is where the real work starts. Many a great wiki has been built but fallen into disrepute and disuse. Wikis have to be managed by the community of users. There are many issues to be tackled and many roles involved to ensure the wiki grows and flourishes. So we hope were at the start of something big.

The moral of this story is that you can get away with a problematic design as long as you user test it, discover the problems and why they arise, then use that information to fix them. That’s the essence of inclusive, user centred design.

Thanks to the IIA for inviting me to be the guest blogger for the next three weeks. In case you don’t know me, I’m Mark Magennis, Director of the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology, which we call CFIT and pronounce “see-fit”. Given our subject matter – web accessibility – the acronym kind of fits. See?

I’m also chair of the IIA User Experience Working Group (UEWG) where we are all passionate about getting the online user experience right. After all, who wouldn’t be? That means maximising usability, accessibility, quality of content, aesthetics and all the other less tangible things that help support users in doing what they want to do online without it being a tedious or frustrating experience.

So I’ll be blogging about all the things CFIT are concerned with and all the things UEWG are concerned with. And I’ve promised Fergal I won’t talk about cats or donkeys. Oh damn! I did! Well, I won’t mention them again. Strictly users, users, users from now on.